First It Was Great Dal, Now Great Is Rosenthal

First it was great Dal,
now great is Rosenthal.
Yes, the language, as if out of spite,
was clearly unlucky with Russians.
There was Baudouin de Courtenay,
and beside him, back to back,
in Berlin Vasmer published long ago
an etymological dictionary.
Then came Barkhudaryan,
his countryman Hovhannisyan.
Every non-Russian has long grown used
to dictating to us our native tongue.
But the people are amazed:
the language, what a marvel, lives on.
Though Dal worked on it,
Barkhudaryan and Rosenthal.

Literal translation

This poem was written by the announcer Ilya Prudovsky for the 80th jubilee of Ditmar Elyashevich Rosenthal (1900-1994) and read at the celebration. Rosenthal himself approved the verse, asking for a copy. Soon the lines passed into popular circulation and even began to circulate as an anecdote among students of Russian at Harvard